On the morning of April 5, 1943, three Brazilian fishermen working the coastal waters near the mouth of the Amazon noticed something wrong on the horizon. A small wooden raft was drifting in from the open ocean, and the figure crouched on it was barely moving. When they pulled alongside and helped the man aboard their boat, they found a young Chinese man who had lost about twenty pounds, who had not stood on solid ground in more than four months, and who was, by every reasonable calculation, not supposed to be alive.
His name was Poon Lim. His ship — the SS Benlomond, a British cargo vessel with a crew of fifty-four — had been torpedoed in the South Atlantic on November 23, 1942. Poon Lim was the only person who survived.
He had been alone on an eight-foot wooden raft for one hundred and thirty-three days.
## The World He Came From
Poon Lim was born on March 8, 1918, in Qishan village, in Gongpo, part of Wenchang County on Hainan Island, in the south of the Republic of China. The specific geography of his birth is not incidental to the story that follows: Hainan was a maritime province, an island whose population had for generations maintained a working relationship with the sea. The cooking tradition of Hainan included fish prepared in ways that the island’s proximity to warm Pacific and South China Sea waters made possible, and the knowledge of currents, tides, and ocean-going fishing was part of the cultural inheritance that boys in coastal communities grew up absorbing.